Letters to the Editor
lee_sf
Published Letters: 35 Editor's Choice: 6
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An "antidote for demographic collapse"
[Read the article: The battle to ban birth control]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The article makes little mention of another purpose behind limiting contraception- a straightforward desire for more babies and bigger families to combat focused breeding in non-Christian nations. A top-level article on noroomforcontraception.com by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. refers to the West's demographic death spiral and includes the sentence:
Without [mothers'] contribution of a healthy, functioning next generation, all the strength of the U.S. military won’t be enough to protect us from the primal force of Islam that believes in itself enough to replace itself.
Limiting contraception is a lot of things; it's also apparently an important tactic in the religious clash between Christianity and Islam.
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Subjective versus objective worlds
[Read the article: "Religious belief itself is an adaptation"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In many ways this ongoing argument doesn't make sense to me. Science is the process of discovering and documenting the material world, using well-defined, repeatable, public processes. It's done by humans, so includes the results of human fallibility, but also includes a process for minimizing errors over time. I'm surrounded by evidence that the scientific process works, evidence that the physical world responds in predictable ways to processes and approaches developed through science.
That's completely different than what goes on in my head, or your head, what we feel, believe, sense. Senses and feelings, near as I can tell, are arbitrary and individualized, the result of history, family, context, nature, nurture, and what you had for lunch today. Do they count and matter? Sure. But they matter in a much different way than the physical world. Believing in and feeling a spiritual presence in your life may be as real to you as anything, but it's fundamentally different from believing that the physical structure over your head is going to hold up your roof (or understanding when it might fall down).
At least, it is for me. Maybe it isn't for you.
Which leads to... I wish to heck the people that feel a spiritual presence in their lives would stop conflating a subjective belief in God and religion with objective rules and realities about the physical world and the processes used to understand it. And I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop describing my objective approach as a subjective, evasive "belief in the religion of science," used to escape responsibility for living a moral, conscious life. (I think I'm doing pretty OK facing up to and figuring out moral, respectful, and conscious behaviors with what I have.) In turn, I'll treat you as I'd like to be treated, giving you space to live your life as you see fit.
I'm not sure which point ticks me off more- the attempt to define that an understanding and acceptance of scientific process is just another feeling-based dogma, or claiming that the subjective reality happening inside one's head should apply generally to the physical world and be shared by everyone in it.
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Absolute Truth? Nope.
[Read the article: "Religious belief itself is an adaptation"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]On the other hand, you find a HUGE problem with anyone even suggesting that "science" is NOT Absolute Truth
That's a false statement. I think the scientific method is a good process for figuring things out in the physical world. The narratives that result can be useful for making predictions about how aspects of the physical world will behave in different circumstances. Scientific language reflects this, most prominently by describing narratives as "theories."
Do I believe in absolutes or absolute truth (or Absolute [Moral] Truths)? Interesting questions, almost self-referential, and all different. It looks like there's been at least two hundred years of discussion and debate behind them, where the increasing effect of the Enlightenment was to reduce the absolutes available from the Bible.
Keeping this discussion more bounded- do I believe there are absolutes in the physical world? Well, probably, though it's hard to tell what they might be at this point (I'm thinking in terms of what's next after quantum mechanics).
Do I believe in the concept of Absolute Truth? No. Are there pragmatic absolutes or absolute truths in a human sense? Maybe, though I don't really know. A statement like "thou shall not kill" seems like a pretty good candidate for one, but we as a society (including the major religious parts) seem to have a hard time showing we really believe it. Do I believe the Bible is absolute truth? No. I'm not rejecting it as a source of ideas in a postmodern world, but there are other sources of guidance (Zen and modern Buddhism) that are making more sense to me at the moment.
It's a hard problem, which the original article discussed (worth re-reading after all this). I think we as a modern society have painted ourselves into yet another corner- we had various spiritual structures that worked to provide truths about how to live one's life and exist as a society, as long as we remained ignorant of the physical world. The human drive to eliminate ignorance, though, has stripped a lot of that away, leaving us scrambling to figure out what to do about a spiritual life. I think we need something; a dogmatic, inflexible Christian (or Muslim) approach doesn't feel like the right thing.
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Thanks to David Hockey and AllTooHuman for the references. Also found Richard Rorty and the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left interesting, along with a Christian critique of his ideas:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty
Richard Rorty and the Postmodern Rejection of Absolute Truth http://www.leaderu.com/aip/docs/geuras.html